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Alvaro Montoro
Alvaro Montoro

Posted on • Originally published at alvaromontoro.com

Myths about Web Accessibility (Intro)

There is an all-in-one article including every part from this series (if you want prefer to read it all at once instead of "by installments")

Web Accessibility is a must in every web development project, yet it seems to remain a mystery for many web developers. Like it's something legendary instead of an essential skill needed for the job.

There are many misconceptions surrounding Web Accessibility, most of the time fueled by a lack of knowledge (or interest) in the matter. This article is a collection of some of those accessibility misconceptions or myths.

Content of the series:

  • Accessibility is difficult
  • Accessibility is expensive
  • Accessible websites are ugly
  • Accessibility is for blind people/screen readers
  • Accessibility is for people with disabilities
  • Automatic tests are enough for accessibility
  • Accessibility overlays are enough to ensure Web Accessibility
  • HTML is accessible by default
  • No ARIA > Bad ARIA
  • Prefers reduced motion means no motion

Thank you Todd Libby, Laurent Denoue, Cristian Diaz, InHuOfficial, and Maciej Pędzich, for all your insights, feedback, and (constructive) criticism when writing the article.

Cover image by Mike Hindle on Unsplash.

Top comments (6)

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Ok so is this a new tactic for articles you have learned?

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alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro • Edited

It's no tactic (at least not something that I know). The thing is that I ran a poll on Twitter asking if people prefer long articles or breaking them down in smaller pieces. Overall, long articles won (~50%, compared to ~30% of short articles iirc). But personally, I find articles longer than 10 minutes tough to read. It may be psychological, but I find it easier to read ten 1-minute articles than one 10-minute article.

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

I tell you what would be interesting, to see if you get more overall views and (more importantly) interactions with the multiple articles vs the one large one.

Obviously I have skewed the results by commenting on this article but still an interesting thing to explore!

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alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro • Edited

From experience (I already broke a really long article into a series of articles, but that's one case and it may be anecdotal), the long article tends to do better than the series in number of reads, and you'll get more reactions overall with many small articles. Maybe it would be different if you posted each part of the series on different days instead of all at once as I did. But I was not looking for reactions/reads, more of convenience/options for the reader.

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Ah I see!

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francoisaudic profile image
francoisaudic • Edited

Thanks for this series of posts